I have mentioned once before (when talking about Django Reinhardt) that the cover of David Grisman’s album ‘Hot Dawg’ freaked me out as a kid. Sharp, angular, metallic bodies contorted around instruments make up the cover. It looks cold, and I remember thinking that this was a picture of people that had somehow been frozen into these forms involuntarily. Apparently as a kid, I was worried about being frozen into a form involuntarily. This probably came from some bad movie where a stop-motion Medusa turned men to stone, or some other magical evil… I can’t really remember. But I DO remember that David Grisman cover sitting in front of my dad’s records and those figures seemed to give me a cold scary stare. There is some irony here though, since the music on the album is highly influenced by jazz, bluegrass and folk music. Stephane Grapelli makes a guest appearance for a recording of his and Django’s ‘Minor Swing’ (the version I associated with the song until well into my teenage years). The opening number ‘Dawg’s Bull’ starts off with a quick pulse from the violin that slowly build up to the whole group playing some amazingly fast music. In unison. Very clean…

Now that I know the influences of this music much better, perhaps there isn’t such an irony to the cover art. This is 1970s jazz, a time period riddled with the cleanliness of fusion and the death of the 50s and 60s bop->hard-bop->out there jazz transitions. Not that the free jazz solo ever sold enough albums to be ‘replaced’ by another step in the evolution of jazz, but if John Coltrane had been alive during the time of Weather Report, I’d be curious to see how different the styles of jazz would have been. Probably not much different, and with recording technology (with multiple tracks and takes) became better it was probably unavoidable that jazz, as with rock, would move towards a similar slick recorded presentation. And though I still like ‘Hot Dawg’ quite a bit, and am amazed by the playing on the disc, the freer, looser feel on David Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label is the sound that I imagine he prefers. I wonder if ‘Hot Dawg’ recorded in the mid-90s would have sounded different. Little grittier, a little earthier.

Recordings are of course simply a record, not necessarily of a moment captured in time anymore, but possibly of many moments mixed together to get a performance that the artist wanted others to hear again and again. That’s hard to do. And as critical as I can be of what seems like a feeling of coldness on the part of ‘Hot Dawg’, I also have an image in my mind for some reason of listening to it in a dim room with just a fire in the fire place, and my dad laying on the floor and listening to it. Over the speakers, with the crackle of wood (and the snaps and pops of the vinyl) it probably sounded warmer then the CD I know have. And as long as I don’t think about that cover, this homey warmth is still the memory of this album that I have. No matter how many takes it took to record it.